NWS getting out of commodity IT through cloud, shared services

Iftikhar Jamil, associate CIO for weather, NOAA

The National Weather Service recently migrated its high performance computing to a
new capability in a private cloud.

Instead of running its own hardware and software, NWS moved to a managed service
from IBM under a $19 million-a-year contract.

"We have more than doubled our capacity from 90 terabytes to about 213 terabytes a
second. This is potentially a game-changer what we are looking at to be able to
provide better services," said Iftikhar Jamil, the associate chief information
officer for weather at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "We
want to be able to do complex computations at a much faster rate, and this is the
capability that will provide more accuracy, higher fidelity and in a faster
processing time so people will see the results faster."

Jamil, whose position used to be known as the NWS CIO, said under the contract IBM
will upgrade the high-performance computing capabilities every two-and-a-half
years.

Moving high-performance computing to the cloud is one of several technology
capabilities that the weather service is upgrading.

For example, the weather service is charged with building the dissemination-as-a-
service capability for all of Commerce.

"Our intention is to basically set it up, get it up and running and offer it as a
service for the NOAA enterprise," Jamil said. "We are building that at the
beginning stages of it. There will be some small [procurement] actions coming out
over the next few months or a year or so that people should keep an eye out for."

He said the dissemination-as-a-service is focused on getting weather alerts out as
soon as possible.

Jamil said there are many different ways to deliver those kinds of warnings,
whether through radio or television broadcast or cell phones, and other avenues,
the goal is communicate with the entire community easily and quickly.